PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts jury plans to deliberate a fifth day Wednesday on whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible when she strangled her three children in 2023, amid conflicting testimony about her postpregnancy mental health.
What happens if they can’t reach a verdict?
A mistrial will be declared and the case essentially goes back to the same status as before the trial, with the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse charged with murder and held at a psychiatric hospital awaiting resolution of the criminal case.
Prosecutors will decide whether to try again with a new jury. If they do, the jury selection process will begin again and a new trial will be scheduled.
Prosecutors could also offer a plea deal to Clancy, said Brad Bailey, a Boston defense attorney and former prosecutor who is not involved in the case.
“Any time the threat of a retrial with murder one hanging over the client is re-interjected, defense lawyers will, at the very least, explore whether or not there’s any interest in a resolution,” Bailey said.
Clancy doesn’t deny strangling her children at their home south of Boston, but says postpartum psychosis led to her actions. After the killings, her husband found her badly injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing.
Though less likely, the district attorney’s office could decide to not retry the case.
“Sometimes they decide not to, because of the sense that there may be the same result each time they try it, and because of the expenditures involved in trying the case to begin with, particularly when you have expert witnesses,” he said. “Those are going to be expensive cases.”
Bailey expects her defense attorney to aggressively lobby against another trial, making a case to the district attorney’s office along the lines of: “‘Why are you doing this to this poor woman? She’s still clearly obviously suffering. She’s been punished with her paralysis and, worse than that, the loss of her three children.’”
A conviction could mean life in prison for Clancy, while an acquittal might lead to confinement in a mental health facility.
Karen Read was charged in the 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend. Jurors in her 2024 trial deadlocked on the fifth day of deliberations, leading to a mistrial.
Prosecutors chose to retry the case, but a different jury last year found Read not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.
Like Read's case, Clancy's has drawn a divided public reaction.
Clancy's livestreamed trial drew attention to maternal mental health after childbirth and was closely watched by a polarized public. Clancy’s sympathizers saw her as a loving mom who had realized something was badly wrong in the months ahead of the killings and sought help, including checking herself in to a psychiatric hospital. Her detractors said she deserved to be punished for an evil and selfish act.
Lindsay Clancy reacts to the jury saying they cannot reach a verdict during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Hours after Russian ballistic missiles shook Kyiv overnight, balloons floated above a schoolyard in the Ukrainian capital’s Obolon district on Tuesday. Bleary-eyed parents and children in festive outfits gathered to music, determined to celebrate the traditional start of the school year.
But within seconds, an air raid alert sounded, and the crowd dispersed. Children’s laughter and music gave way to distant explosions.
Ukrainian students are beginning their fifth school year since Russia’s invasion, with no end to the war in sight. Thousands of schools have adapted, shifting to remote or hybrid learning, holding classes in shelters or closing in destroyed or Russian-occupied towns.
Russian attacks have destroyed an estimated 1 million textbooks, and officials are preparing for what could be one of the war’s hardest winters.
Years of war are taking a heavy toll on Ukrainians as Russia escalates its attacks. Ukraine has few effective means of intercepting the growing barrage of high-speed ballistic missiles, while waves of jet-powered Shahed drones stretch some attacks over days.
With sirens sounding across Kyiv every few hours, school principal Yevhen Poliakov considered canceling the ceremony. But Lyceum Obolon has a shelter, and he was confident the children could reach safety quickly. They did.
Kyiv schools plan to begin the academic year with a blend of in-person and remote classes, shifting quickly depending on the security situation, the city administration said.
Ukraine’s education minister, Andrii Butenko, said in August that 8,424 of the country's general secondary schools will operate in person, 1,306 remotely, and 2,211 in a blended format — meaning nearly a third cannot open fully in person.
Poliakov has tried to keep students in the classroom, seeing drawbacks to remote learning.
“Parents need to work and earn money,” he said. “We’ll teach them here, and it’s better for a child to be under our supervision than alone on the ninth floor while mom and dad are at work — with just the dog for company, not knowing what to do.”
His school also uses Mriia, Ukraine’s national education app and web portal, to connect students, parents, teachers, and school administrators and support remote learning.
The school is also upgrading its shelter, preparing for winter blackouts and stockpiling firewood.
Elsewhere in Kyiv, only a handful of children showed up for the informal ceremony at a school damaged in a Russian attack days earlier.
Windows, facades, hallways, doors and equipment in three buildings were damaged, and most students began the school year online.
Oksana Herasymchuk and her daughter, who started middle school, went anyway. Her daughter began first grade in 2022, months after Russia's invasion, and the family has struggled to adjust to wartime conditions.
After the attack, Herasymchuk isn't sure what comes next.
“Our children’s age group has faced a lot of trials," she said.
Yevhen Yurko brought his 6-year-old son Darii to the school on the boy’s first day. Darii had his first lesson online but he wanted to see the school in person.
Yurko photographed his son wearing a traditional embroidered vyshyvanka shirt in the nearly empty schoolyard.
“Even like this, I still wanted something to remember this day by,” Yurko said.
He and his wife plan to stay in Kyiv and keep Darii in the school. They believe he can learn there even if classes are held in a basement.
Since the start of the full-scale war, 318 education facilities in Kyiv have been damaged, including 156 schools, according to the city’s education department. Some schools have been hit two to eight times.
The number of first-graders in Kyiv schools has dropped by about 40% since the start of the war — from 28,500 on Sept. 1, 2022, to 16,600 this year.
“Ukrainian education right now feels like a constant obstacle course,” said Anna Putsova, a co-founder of the savED charitable foundation. “The system adapts, but conditions often change faster than you can build one model and say: ‘now we work like this.’”
The war’s toll on education is “very serious,” Putsova said, citing accumulated learning loss, a shrinking student population and a heavy burden on schools and teachers. The number of schoolchildren in Ukraine has fallen 17.5%, or by more than 755,000, since the 2021-22 school year.
“School is an environment where a child learns to interact with others, build relationships, work in a group, resolve conflicts, be part of a community,” Putsova said. “For some Ukrainian children, there hasn’t been a normal school experience in several years.”
The war’s impact varies sharply by region, she said: some areas face constant air raid alerts, while others have relied mostly on online learning for years because safe in-person classes are only possible underground. Some communities have seen an influx of displaced children outpace school capacity, while others have lost so many students that schools have had to merge or close.
Among regions where savED works, damaged or destroyed schools account for more than 92% of those operating in the Ukraine-held part of southern Kherson region and about 39% in Mykolaiv. In the eastern Kharkiv region, the figure is more than 67%; in the northern Sumy region, nearly 54%.
“In the long term, this is no longer just a question of school,” Putsova said. “The knowledge level of today’s children will determine the quality of future specialists, the productivity of the economy, the country’s ability to create complex products and technologies."
Teachers conduct online lessons for elementary students from a public school damaged by a Russian attack, in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Schoolgirls work on a lesson in a bomb shelter during a Russian air attack on the first day at school at a cadet lyceum in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Cadets sing the national anthem on the first day at school in a cadet lyceum in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Children, parents and teachers stay in an underground shelter during an air raid alarm during the traditional back to school celebrations in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Young girls sit in an underground shelter during an air raid alarm during the traditional back to school celebrations in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
School children enter an underground school on their first day back, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko)
School children enter an underground school on their first day back, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko)
Children play in an underground shelter during an air raid alarm during the traditional back to school celebrations in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Teachers conduct online lessons for elementary students from a public school damaged by a Russian attack, in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Yevhen Yurko, 41, and his son Darii, a 6-year-old first-grader, pose for a photo in the courtyard of a public school damaged by a Russian attack, in Kyiv, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov) CORRECTION: Name of child corrected from Dayri to Darii.
